How To Overcome the 3 Big Facebook Marketing Challenges [Charts]

5 Tactics To Improve Your Facebook Marketing

Size matters for marketers especially where media is concerned. When it comes to social media, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla. According to Nielsen, Facebook has 152.7 million users in the US who spend an average of almost seven hours a month on the site. That’s roughly one quarter of their online time. [Here are eleven tips to increase Facebook effectiveness along with related research.]

3 Big Facebook marketing challenges

Facebook is a marketing must-have. Facebook has gotten too big and its participants are too involved for marketers to avoid. Therefore, you must have a Facebook marketing strategy that integrates your Facebook presence into your overall marketing plans. That said, this is more important for consumer-oriented offerings than business ones.

Facebook requires content marketing. Roughly nine out of ten marketers would place content marketing on Facebook without running any advertising on Facebook according to research by Ad Age and Citigroup in June 2012. This was the subtext of GM’s move to stop its Facebook advertising of about $10 million. By contrast, GM spent $30 million, or three times that amount to create and maintain their Facebook presence.

Facebook marketing doesn’t convert to sales. One of the main reasons marketers use social media and Facebook is to increase sales – a core marketing objective as indicated by purchase intent. For one third of Ad Age and Citigroup research respondents, Facebook wasn’t useful in driving purchase intent. Further roughly two fifths of respondents said the ROI of Facebook was inferior to the ROI of other platforms such as Yahoo! or Google. In general, branding metrics aren’t as directly trackable as sales. Therefore, while Facebook increases engagement, marketers haven’t been able to associate actual results with related Facebook investments in content, advertising and support. In part, this is attributable to the well known integrated/cross media challenges where the last marketing touched gets full credit for the sale. Below is chart of Facebook post effectiveness via Kanter Compete Media

5 Actionable Facebook marketing tips

Have a Facebook strategy. While my first choices for social media marketing are blogs and online video, for most firms, Facebook is too large to ignore. At a minimum, develop your business’ Facebook presence and integrate it into your overall marketing plan. To this end, it helps to understand your target audience’s social media persona.

Post images and photos to increase effectiveness. Research from Kanter Media Compete via Ad Age revealed that post effectiveness on Facebook has declined relative to other major online media sites. As a result, focus on the most engaging format, images.

Coordinate Facebook advertising with Facebook content. Seven out of ten respondents to the Ad Age and Citigroup Research believed that there was a link between Facebook content and advertising.

Send participants to your Facebook page from ads. Facebook users tend to stay on Facebook. As a result, Facebook advertising works best when you send users to your Facebook page to complete the conversion instead of to your website.

Facebook is an important element to add to your marketing plans. As with any other form of marketing, make sure you’re maximizing your effectiveness at every step of the process.

What other Facebook tactics do you recommend marketers follow and why?